Control freaks, creativity, and your career

Political correctness (PC) and more general forms of control quash your creativity, sap your limited energy, and hence harm your career, paycheck, and life. Follow my logic:

Does a touch of brain damage boost creativity?

Some of the best music came from an era in which we all had more lead (a potent neurotoxin) in plumbing pipes and fixtures as well as gasoline and paint, with the latter peeling (and hence dosing) especially in cities such as Detroit that spawned some of the most gifted musicians to ever live.

Beyond the effects of lead are hard drugs and booze, seemingly better at dissolving brainpower than creating it, yet musicians and other creative types often thrive in spite of them—or because of them?

Consider Ernest Hemingway, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Nobel Prize in Literature, and the hearts of fans then and now mesmerized by his way with words. Beyond his legendary talent was a legendary affinity for alcohol.

“Findings from neuroscience suggest that for most people, judgment and imagination sit on opposite ends of a mental spectrum. The more skilled one is at seeing things as they are (judgment) the harder it is to see things as they might be (imagination).” — John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen in The Self-made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value

Thomas Edison, a synonym for exceptional inventive creativity and productivity, “claimed he slept no more than four hours a day.”

Edison was thinking less sleep = more time to work, but less sleep = more exhaustion that can catalyze creativity.

My UPS driver taught me how alcohol can fuel creativity. Delivering a dented package one day, I held it as he checked if the contents were damaged. As he spoke, he sounded really sick, and in subsequent deliveries mentioned his very nasty, unusually prolonged cold.

I knew exactly what he was talking about because I caught it from him, giving me a cough that made restful sleep impossible. OTC cough syrup didn’t touch it and I wouldn’t take the prescription stuff (too constipating) so I instead used booze to essentially put my cough to sleep. For the duration of that cold, drinking more than I ever had before or since, my creativity skyrocketed, as evidenced by one day in which I had two dozen inventions before noon.

I’ve noticed similar but less marked effects after consuming smaller amounts of alcohol other times. The $64,000 question is: how can something that puts the brain to sleep wake up creativity?

The answer is that the brain has more than zones generating ideas; it also has ones suppressing them from consciousness by filtering them out. If alcohol or other brainpower “off” switches like drugs are better at putting the filter to sleep than the parts generating ideas, they allow creativity to bubble to the surface of consciousness and you may have an “aha!” eureka moment or simply a good idea—especially if you’ve primed your brain with a challenging problem and relevant facts, leaving it to connect the dots.

“ Fatigue is your friend [to enhance creativity]. There’s a point at which … the critical faculty can overwhelm the creative faculty. … When you’re tired, you just write it, and all sorts of different kinds of work comes out.” — Lorne Michaels, creator and producer of Saturday Night Live

Discussing this in Want To Be More Creative? Don’t Sleep, Paul Petrone wrote, “Michaels … went on to say that when creative types are tired, they lose their filter.”

Your brain thinks it is doing you a favor when the filters do what they were designed to do: censor and hence limit ideas from popping into your consciousness and perhaps distracting you from, say, a saber-toothed tiger in prehistoric times. Now that life is inherently safer, people can hole up inside buildings and safely invent or write like Hemingway—or try to.

More control, fewer ideas

One of the inimical effects of our culture is that it makes our filters work overtime 24/7/365 censoring everything we say and do lest we offend someone, violate an ever-increasing number of rules for political correctness, or give a potential employer reason to think we’re not a cookie-cutter-perfect robotic clone every minute of every day.

josefkubes, bigstockphoto.com

ER doctors know that if 100% of the patients they suspect of having appendicitis show evidence of it in the operating room, their diagnostic threshold is so high they’re almost certainly missing cases of it. Similarly, people who filter themselves so successfully they never offend others are almost certainly censoring out bright ideas and cutting-edge humor.

One of the remarkable things about the brain is that if you do something a lot, you become better at it. If you’re frequently watching what you say, your filters become increasingly better at filtering—perhaps offending no one, but also impressing no one, either.

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” — Abraham Lincoln

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.” — H. L. Mencken

This is why only mind-numbingly stupid corporations screen candidates by Googling them or scouring Facebook searching for flaws. If you haven’t spent time in prison (and perhaps even if you have), your flaws are almost certainly just normal human imperfections possessed by everyone from Presidents on down.

“It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.” — Henry Ford

If control is so good, why does the United States, steeped as it is in PC rules and going overboard with laws (“the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of world prisoners”), have such problems with people going out of control?

If there is a school shooting or someone else going postal, it is likely to be in the USA now—not decades ago before there was much gun control or PC control. When the screws are tightened and people can’t vent as they once did, might it be that all that control makes people more likely to really explode? Might not it be better to blow off steam now and then without PC ninnies and other control freaks scrutinizing you from every possible angle to see if you violated one of their myriad rules they’re hoping will trip you up?

We can play silly little games such as thinking “my flaws are better than your flaws,” but we all have them, and the world would be a better place if we expended less energy creating fake veneers to fool others and more energy into creating stuff that solves problems and makes life more enjoyable. We need breakthroughs more than we do political correctness that isn’t doing much if any good—its benefits are an illusion, with the rough edges of reality still there, just camouflaged over, impressing only the dupes fond of being fooled.

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” — Elbert Hubbard

My best friend says that I am funniest when I’m really tired and what little filters I have are sound asleep. She says if I could relax around a camera (I can’t), even when I’m not tired I could have my own unscripted comedy show more hilarious than the contrived stuff on TV crafted by screenwriters working overtime trying to be funny.

The uptight past girlfriends I could never relax around never saw that aspect of me because I was so mesmerized by their beauty (back in the days when I thought that was very important) I succumbed to their control-freak tendencies just so I could lock lips with someone who looked like a cross between a young Natalie Wood and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover model. Faustian bargains aren’t such bargains, are they? The pursuit of beauty is an ugly mistake.

When I was a child, “let it all hang out” was a common saying. Now it’s not, not surprisingly, and we’re paying a price because of it—also not surprisingly.

Let it all hang out means to totally relax and be yourself, being completely candid in expressing your feelings and opinions, holding nothing back, not disguising anything and not fearing judgment by others. In other words, put your filter to sleep and be the real you, not the fake you designed to impress fake people daffy enough to think the world would somehow be a better place if only it were more fake.

Chris Bailey, author of The Productivity Project, said eureka moments are most apt to occur “when you're operating on automatic pilot, and doing familiar things like taking a shower, gardening, going on a walk, or letting your mind relax.” If you are censoring yourself, you’re not relaxed. Conclusion? Hello self-censoring, goodbye eureka moments and breakthroughs. He added that “a recent survey found that people spend 51.8 hours staring at screens every week.” Now consider what Albert Einstein said: “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

People commonly censor themselves in generating their profiles on LinkedIn and similar sites, thinking that will make them seem more professional. Doctors make the same mistake throughout their working lives, evidently thinking that suppressing their true selves and acting like a friendly robotic shell of a person will somehow enable them to better connect with people. Wrong.

When I worked as an ER doctor, my job was to help people, not impress them. I knew that people don’t warm up to cold, arrogant, aloof robots, so I was Dr. Down-to-Earth. Many patients said they felt as if they could tell me anything—even things they'd never told their spouse or the family doc they had for decades—five minutes after meeting me in a busy ER! When people really open up, they often give clues that aid diagnosis and therapy.

I harmonized better with adults, teenagers, and children. Kids often fear doctors (I know I did!) and sometimes cry or strongly resist physical examinations and procedures, which can lead to tragic outcomes, such as a child who lost an eye after a doc I worked with failed to obtain a good exam. I got kids to eagerly cooperate by turning the necessary task into play. If sending them home with two eyes necessitated I act zany, of course I’d do it. Ironically, when other doctors don’t do this, they utter fail the true test of professionalism: putting the interests of those they serve ahead of their own.

Creativity is crucial to medicine. Creativity enabled me to think of 1001 ways to improve medical care and deliver it at less cost. Creativity is equally essential to other jobs and economic growth. A sudden flash of insight can obviate the need for years of work by billions of people, transforming their lives and enriching them by facilitating better work-life balance that may pave the way for more people to have the mental downtime essential for creativity to flourish. The Harvard Business Review—not the Harvard Slacker Review—published a relevant article, The Upside of Downtime.

There is no upside to self-censoring to placate the control freaks. If there were, our onerously controlling world wouldn’t be beset by so many problems. The antidote for problems is creativity: the freedom to be yourself and think for yourself. That’s what makes you unique; that is what makes you great. The control freaks running our culture and world (into the ground) know that, so they want unfettered freedom only for themselves. They’re not very creative—have you noticed?— so they can stay on top only by repressing creativity in others. Don’t let ’em.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series; Part 2 is Self-censoring is bad for your career and the economy.

References:

Alcohol boosts recall of earlier learning based on Improved memory for information learnt before alcohol use in social drinkers tested in a naturalistic setting Comment: By boosting recall of information previously learned, alcohol might help people connect the dots, thereby facilitating creativity.

Suppressing Brain's 'Filter' Can Improve Performance in Creative Tasks

?“Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior … [such as filtering yourself] your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future -- so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it.”— Dr. Travis Bradberry

Alcohol boosts ability to solve problems creatively

“… a small tipple [drinking alcohol] makes it easier to solve problems that require creative solutions.”

Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving

Chris Bailey: This week, carve out time to daydream Comment: If mental downtime were the most crucial key to creativity, most breakthroughs would be generated by children, retired folks, those on unemployment or welfare, or ones who inherited or otherwise acquired enough money so they rarely or never need to work. Chris Bailey did say it is crucial to spend time in both modes: the mind-wandering/daydreaming autopilot and the focused “central executive” mode, but just about everyone does this; we focus on stuff and daydream, often too much. During medical school, I often spent more time daydreaming than studying but generated a grand total of zero breakthroughs then—and if I had a single brilliant idea, it was so inconsequential I can’t remember it.

Thus while I wholeheartedly agree with much of what Chris said, a good theory must explain why most people who focus and daydream (occasionally, moderately, or often) never conceive the hallmark of creativity: trailblazing ideas.

Trump’s businesses feel few adverse effects from an unfiltered candidate

Based on materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “If you can train people's responses, the theory is that over longer periods, their ability to control their responses on a moment-by-moment basis will eventually be embedded in their brain structure.” (That referred to anxiety and optimism but likely also pertains to this topic.)

Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life Comment: The author, developmental psychologist Peter Gray, contends that an overly structured and controlling world hinders creativity and inhibits personal development so people don’t blossom to their full potential. He’s correct.

Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation

Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal(Abstract excerpt: “The findings indicate that tasks involving creativity might benefit from a non-optimal time of day.”)

Sleep Deprivation Amps Up the Brain

Creative genius driven by distraction based on Creativity and sensory gating indexed by the P50: Selective versus leaky sensory gating in divergent thinkers and creative achieversExcerpt: “Overall results suggest that leaky sensory gating may help people integrate ideas that are outside of focus of attention, leading to creativity in the real world …”

To Get More Creative, Become Less ProductiveExcerpt: “Creativity needs time and space to grow. … a lot of creative activity may look suspiciously like loafing around until the breakthrough comes.”

Downregulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex Prevents Social Conformity

Self-control saps memory, study says

The irony of Silicon Valley

Intolerance We Trust by Steve Faktor Comment: This is one of the best articles ever written because research demonstrates that NOT filtering yourself is key to creativity, and creativity is ultimately the engine that catalyzes progress and economic growth. As the PC police enforced ever more draconian standards of intolerance for occasional human imperfections, creativity plummeted because the brain's filter, once engaged, isn't selective in what it screens out. The bottom line is that control is inimical to our success individually and collectively. Kudos to Steve Faktor for a brilliant article.

Greater working memory capacity benefits analytic, but not creative, problem-solving

Don’t think: How your brain works things out all by itself Excerpt: “… people who tend to solve problems in ‘aha’ moments of insight have different resting state brain activity – with less frontal control – than more logical thinkers.” Comment: Frontal control is great for self-censoring, not generating breakthroughs.

Your Brain Has 2 Ways of Solving Problems. Which Is Best?: Fascinating study compares flashes of insight with careful analysis.